The Natural

Twitter is wonderful for pointing you to things you should have known, but had missed. 

I'd missed (then) Don McCloskey (now Deirdre)'s 1992 piece in the Eastern: The Natural.

Richard Bower is an economist right down to his wing tip shoes. He knows Sophocles and Shakespeare all right, but (there it is again) he believes in economics. not all economists do, of course. Bower does, as I do, and as perhaps fifteen percent of the profession does. Give the Bowers or the McCloskeys any social situation, from insider trading to an obstreperous teenage child, and they look to economics for an answer, or at least for a good running start.

People who "believe in economics" tend to agree on who the best economists are. They admire economists like Armen Alchian, Ronald Coase, Gary Becker, Gordon Tullock, Leland Yeager, economists often as not unknown to the unbelieving mainstream of the profession.

...

So Bower and I agree on economics. Our agreement makes our one disagreement about teaching it puzzling. Bower thinks that we can teach economics to undergraduates. I disagree. I have concluded reluctantly, after ruminating on it for a long time, that we can't.

Read the whole thing if you, like me, had missed it. McCloskey concludes that Bower overestimates the ability to teach economics to undergrads because he is a natural economist, who comes by the way of thinking easily, while McCloskey took a long time to learn it - and good teaching materials are hard to come by.

But teaching materials for thinking like an economist have gotten better since '92. Harold Winter's texts are excellent. So are Tim Harford's. And all of Marginal Revolution University. And blogs.